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Regarding conciousness and diet, I want to share a practice I have begun recently which I call “ponder the plate”. As I sit down to eat what ever is before me, I ponder where it really came from and what it took to get it to my kitchen.
For example, I made a simple dish called Cabbage Sabzi. Of course there was the cabbage which likely was grown on a medium scale farm here in Colorado over the course of 60-65 days and harvested, trimmed, and sent to the produce aisle in City Market. Also some red bell pepper that likely followed a similar path along with a few carrots. The seasoning for the dish, black mustard seeds and crushed red pepper involved a bit more processing to be harvested, dried, and separated from the rest of the plant before I could use them. The dish also includes almonds that grew on a tree probably in CA, again requiring a pit of processing to before arriving, shelled and dry roasted on the shelf. All of these are cooked in ghee. The ghee began as grass eaten by a cow, milked by a “farmer” (OK, probably a machine), turned into butter, subsequently clarified by me, and now ready to cook with. Finally, there is the coconut topping. Grown on a tree very far form the Rocky Mountains, harvested, shredded, dried, and bagged up to be sold to me by the lovely woman at the Indian Market in Denver (Indus Imports on Mississippi at Federal) that I like to go to when I am there, it gets toasted by me & sprinkled over the final dish.
I find it an interesting exercise to follow the origins of each of the items on my plate (cumin rice and chana masala) in a similar fashion. It strengthens my connection to all the people who help feed me and fosters gratitude for the ability of our Earth to produce such abundance.